The Ugly and Damned

Lost in the Meritocracy
By Walter Kirn
Doubleday, 288 pages, $24.95

The novelist Walter Kirn’s new memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy, contains several references to F. Scott Fitzgerald. One comes early in its pages, when Kirn recalls how as a teenager he read The Great Gatsby and, like its author and its narrator, yearned to leave Minnesota and head East. And so he does, eventually following Fitzgerald to Princeton University. Another Fitzgerald work is mentioned as the memoir winds down. In the window of a shop near campus, young Walter notices a mannequin of a “model undergraduate” cloaked in Princeton gear and holding a copy of This Side of Paradise, which book he “understood—incorrectly, it turned out—to be a pure celebration of Princeton’s goldenness.”

His error is telling. Walter is an English major, and he sees the mannequin in 1982 in the final months of his junior year. Yet, after semesters spent in ostensible examination of literature, he still knows nothing of Fitzgerald’s famous, Princeton-based Bildungs-roman—the story of a young man who, just like Walter, comes to the college from Minnesota and loses his way. Kirn has made his book’s central point: The most burnished meritocrats may, in fact, know nothing.

In placing blame for their ignorance, though, Lost in the Meritocracy is hazier. And young Walter, it should be said,does know something. He has an implicit knowledge of what it is that people in authority (educators, mainly) want from him and how to satisfy their desires. He is, therefore, “a natural-born child of the meritocracy” whose life has been all spelling bees, honor rolls, prizes, and plaques. To shore up his application to transfer to Princeton, for example, Walter searches for “a contest, any contest” he might enter and win. He fixes on a poetry competition, figures that the judges will want something “ragged, chaotic, with uneven lines,” puts some ragged, chaotic lines on paper, takes home first place, and ends up in the Ivy League.

His first roommates at Princeton are a quartet of characters previously unknown to him, among them a mustachioed piano prodigy who smokes menthols in his bathrobe and the prodigy’s girlfriend, whose father owns a Manhattan nightclub and sends a limousine on the weekends to pluck her from campus. Walter is humiliated by them, never more so than when the piano player independently decides to outfit their dormitory common room with expensive pieces from Bloomingdale’s and then demands that Walter pay a “share” of the cost. He can’t and is therefore banished from the space, forbidden to touch the newly purchased furnishings. He must never sit on the couch and always, always tiptoe carefully about the Persian rug when, on occasion, he leaves his bedroom and slinks to the toilet.

Things get worse for Walter, who begins a sexual relationship with a New York City dilettante who dresses like a prostitute and indulges masochistic tendencies. In a rage, he destroys the common room, pouring champagne into the new TV and on the sofa and rug and snipping the strings of his roommate’s Steinway. He barely escapes expulsion. He is accused of cheating on a Spanish test, and barely escapes expulsion yet again.

Through it all, though, he continues his class act, giving his professors what they want, mainly by dropping meaningless words into meaningless phrases:

The Need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery—honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps—left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted. Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds. We recognized one another instantly. . . . We spoke of “playfulness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that the Western canon was “illegitimate.”

_____________

Walter moves out of his dormitory and into an off-campus house populated by vegetarians and Grateful Dead fans. He does a lot of drugs and is philosophical about getting high. As the semesters pass, he gradually becomes unable to discern the words people speak to him and then unable to understand language and meaning at all. His life is confused, chaotic, and vacuous.

As a memoirist, Kirn has planted himself on dangerous ground here. One false step and he is liable to sink into forming yet another iteration of whining from an Ivy League alumnus incensed that his glowing, youthful potential was squandered by a gaudy university that failed him. Does he take that step?

He comes awfully close. The summer after graduating Princeton, and before he is to fly to Oxford on a Keasbey scholarship, Walter spends some time back home in Minnesota. He catches a cold and so decides to pass some bedridden time by reading one of his mother’s “classics for the masses.” He pulls The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the bookshelf.

I did something unprecedented for me: I carried it to my steamy bedroom and actually let it absorb me, page by page, chapter by chapter, straight on to the end. A few days later I repeated the feat with Great Expectations, another canonical stalwart that I’d somehow gotten through Princeton without opening.

Kirn is surely right that many books read in the English classes of elite colleges are nonsense and that many truly great books are unconscionably elided from the curriculum. He is also right to believe that the deconstructionist-cum-nihilist fad of literary criticism is wrongheaded and leads many bright students to approach writing and even thinking in a patently snotty, hubristic, and dismissive way.

But still. Walter reclines in bed with Huckleberry Finn, and freed from Princeton’s debased environs, is finally able to nourish his long-suppressed appetite for real, wholesome literature. Why, though, had he never bothered to open Twain and Dickens before? Was he so thoroughly brainwashed by Marxist professors that it just never occurred to him? Did these dark agents of academia surreptitiously remove the classics from Princeton’s libraries and bookstores?

The connection Kirn makes, whether purposefully or inadvertently, is that his education left him profoundly uneducated and systemically empty—its overlords expected him to produce meaningless sentences about meaningless topics and, when he performed well, bestowed upon him meaningless awards and credentials. The emptiness of the meritocracy leads to the emptiness of his younger self’s entire life. Even if Walter did have his vision clouded by pernicious academics, what does that have to do with vandalizing a Steinway or dropping acid?

In certain instances, it should be said, Walter does seem to understand that he is responsible for the hollowness of his actions and the hollowness he feels. He briefly hangs around Princeton’s public-policy school “in the hope of absorbing its can-do spirit.” He meets students who care deeply about real, worldly problems and he grows “ashamed of his solipsism and foolishness.” Yet he doesn’t do anything with this knowledge, never determines to extract himself from the self-pity and degeneracy. Only when he grows unable to speak does he take the initiative to work himself back into a more normal state, but he quickly relapses and allows his root cynicism to take control.

Walter desperately needs guidance from strong authorities but his dearth of self-direction and self-discipline is nonetheless self-generated—he knows right from wrong and usually chooses the latter. No external force, not his teachers nor Princeton nor the “meritocracy” that so repels Kirn, deserves blame for his condition. His deficiencies can be fixed only when he, himself, picks up the tools. It is far from clear that the clever and limpid Walter Kirn understands this even now, nearly three decades after the Princeton experience he recounts so vividly in Lost in the Meritocracy.